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It was a wedding-plan weekend, dear reader, interspersed with some other entertainments. On Saturday, the official VM fiancee visited a Nicole Miller boutique and fell in love with a gown. At the same time, her parents were testing out the food at the venue where we’re planning to get hitched, down in New Orleans (they’re locals). Today, we bought a stone for The Ring, at a little jeweler in the East Village. (No hyperlinks for any of these places till they’ve done their jobs and I can guarantee their link-worthiness.)

In-between? We risked our very lives. And I’m not talking about today’s return-trip to New York during the Puerto Rico Day Parade.

Very rarely, I’ll find myself struck with a peculiar notion that supersedes every other priority. Saturday afternoon, for example, I noticed a remaindered-book warehouse-store, and it instantly became imperative to stop in. Why? I can’t really explain it. My library is over a thousand volumes at this point, and I’m still immersed in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, which keeps me from opening any other book.

Still, we do as needs must, when the devil drives. Forty-five minutes later, I left with an armload of books, accompanied by a fiancee who has smaller arms and hence a smaller load of books.

Perhaps it’s a mood that makes me susceptible to these uncompromisable whims. I like to think I’ve been much more compromising and flexible in recent years, but how then to explain the mania that grabbed me later that evening? What possessed me, as we were doing our food-shopping Saturday evening, to grab this grotesquerie? To be fair, at the moment I picked up the Jack Daniel’s Mesquite EZ Marinader bag, I turned to my One True Love and said, “I’ll try this during the week, while you’re back in the city.”

But she’d have nothing of it. If I was going to brave a steak immersed in “EZ Marinade,” she’d be by my side. She’s a heck of a girl, that way.

So we bought a pair of unsuspecting steaks, got home, and placed them in the gelatinous muck of the marinading bag. I can’t believe I just wrote that. Anyway, the marinade needed a minimum of 30 minutes to dissolve the steak down to its constituent atoms and restore itself to life soak into the meat, so we gave it an hour while we took care of other stuff (I baked some pre-made/-cut cookies, while my girl stewed bananas in coconut milk). Then it was time for the show.

We put the steaks in the broiler. Because we’re the sort of people who bought Jack Daniel’s Mesquite EZ Marinader, the packaging comes with explicit instructions: namely, take the food OUT of the bag before cooking it. Yes, dear reader, it’s apparently necessary to warn consumers not to put A PLASTIC BAG into a broiler or onto a grill. We took the bag’s advice.

Ten or so minutes later, we got our brown-jelly-covered steaks out of the broiler. Most of the brown jelly seemed to have burned away, but we were afraid it was hiding somewhere in the broiler.

This is the last known picture of me, just a moment before my first bite. Fortunately, my digital camera has a bemusement-filter.

As it turned out, the marinade wasn’t bad. It wasn’t good, either. It was phenomenally generic. Two weeks earlier, Amy & I tried out a rib place here in NJ, but it turned out to be bar food, and the sauce on the ribs was “utterly adequate,” as she put it. These steaks came out the same way; we basically cooked up bar food at home, with better quality meat. Fortunately, we blew off Spirited Away for some Family Guy reruns, and offset the over-sweet marinade with a broccoli rabe and garlic side, but I think I learned my lesson: Never do anything on a whim in a supermarket.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to see how these frozen, microwave-able White Castles came out.

Went into the city last night for my friend Elayne’s birthday get-together. Her birthday was last month, actually, but she and her co-worker James decided to delay their festivities till the semester was over.

So we met at the Telephone Bar, where we had a room sorta reserved to hang out, drink, nosh, and gallivant. But first, I got a long-overdue haircut. I needed to get it cut for about two months, but kept getting delayed and then lazy. Eventually, I started looking like a big angry Q-tip, so I hit the Jean-Claude Biguine on E. 23rd and had a large, swarthy French-speaking guy “style” me. The final result was great. I felt like I was the best-looking straight guy at the party that evening. Not that anyone else believed it.

Anyway, here are some pix, which is all you’re really in this for. I can tell:

Some people talked.

Others sat in a comfyish corner.

Renowned author Samuel R. Delany put in an appearance! Even though Elayne asked me to bring my camera, she seems terrified that I’m taking this pic.

That’s better.

Both guests/hosts of honor! Belated happy birthdays abound!

I had a little too much gin last night, so I’m a bit run down today. I’m also working on a really writing-heavy issue of the magazine (as opposed to the issues where I get in a lot of contributed articles), so I’m outta words right now. I’m gonna go catch Game 1 of the NBA Finals. If I get a chance this weekend, I’ll write up the Mad Mix that I made for Elayne’s birthday gift.

Mad Mix, my musical alter ego, has a new post!

In case the past month had made me forget what it’s like to spend a day in the hospital with Dad, I got a reminder today. Yesterday, he called to say he was having trouble with the big toe of his left foot, that it was so painful (though not swollen) he couldn’t walk on it.

I went to his place last night, got him an icepack, and looked over the affected area. Nothing out of the ordinary, and he didn’t remember any accidents that would’ve caused the pain he was feeling.

This morning, he called bright and early (8:30am) to ask me to help get him to the hospital. We (me, him and his girlfriend) rolled into the emergency room around 9:15, before the rush, and got Dad looked over. The immediate diagnosis (from the admitting nurse) was that he was suffering from gout, possibly stemming from one of his heart medications.

The rest of the day consisted of variations on a theme, as Dad got x-rayed, blood-tested, and circulation-monitored until we finally rolled out of the place at 3:30. Everything else was negative, so the diagnosis remains gout.

Dad was freaked out by the diagnosis, since he’d never had gout before. Like I said, it was probably due to his heart med, and a slightly weird diet (he had liver twice this week). I once got nailed by gout in my ankle, but it correlated to my consuming copious amounts of red wine for several nights straight. Hey, when in Milan . . .

It was a pretty long day for me, as I hadn’t slept much the night before, and didn’t get much food in me at the hospital. After we wrapped up at the hospital and got Dad’s new prescriptions filled, I had to take care of a computer-repair/replacement job for him. This involved meeting the owner of a bait & gun shop here in NJ, where I had some good conversations about home protection.

I’ve now finished two volumes of Proust at the same hospital: the morning of Dad’s surgery, I read the last 120 pages of The Guermantes Way, and today I read the last 60 pages of The Captive. For those of you scoring at home, this means I have 900 pages left in Proust’s mega-work. Funnily enough, it feels like it’s all downhill from here, while 900 pages of just about anyone else would be insanely daunting.

If you’re interested, the up-to-date list of everydamnbook I’ve read since around 1989 is here.

I never really thought about the identity of Deep Throat, so the revelation this week that it was a disgruntled FBI exec who leaked all that info about Anthony Hopkins to Redford and Hoffman didn’t cause a lot of waves at the Virtual Memories Palace. I was more interested in the story about that dude who solved Fermat’s Theorem. The answers to either of these questions has no real effect on my life, but hey.

I was also more interested in something that grabbed Mickey Kaus’ attention: What about all those other Watergate characters who used to not-exactly-deny that they were Deep Throat? It’s kind of funny that so many other people were fingered as possible sources, but few of them came out and straightforwardly said it wasn’t them. Instead, it was as if they could cloak themselves in a little notoriety, an air of mystery about their true identities. Not content with being has-been political hacks, they had a little something to hold on to.

Till now. Many of them are dead, and the rest can now celebrate complete has-been status, soon to join Mr. Felt in a nursing home. That’s history for you.

An ongoing thing in this blog is the importance of friendship. I care a lot about my friends, even though I’ve seen a couple of decades-long friendships melt down in the past year or two.

Tonight, while I was yo-yo’ing on Rt. 287 (I felt like a vroom, okay?), I thought about the ways we stay in touch with people, and the ways we let them go. Last night, one of my friends and I talked about a mutual buddy, and how he was losing friendship points by repeatedly falling out of touch.

So, here’s the challenge: Imagine that you’re getting married, and you need to work on your guest-list. Write down the names of all the friends whom you’d invite to your wedding day. Then, next to each name, write down the last time you were in touch with that person.

Then start getting back in touch with them, starting with the one you’ve been out of touch with the longest.

Faiz K. just sent me the URL for an Ali G Translator.

My brother and I get along pretty well. We live somewhat different lives, but that’s never been a source of conflict between us. We tend to read many of the same books, like the same sports, and survived the same set of parents.

Our politics have grown apart in the last few years, but our disagreements are pretty civil, and we each understand how the other came to think what he thinks.

In contract, I offer you Christopher and Peter Hitchens, who evidently haven’t spoken in nearly 4 years because of a joke about the Red Army. The Guardian newspaper brought them together for an appearance, and the results are pretty entertaining:

CH: [. . .] And I thought [the joke] was quite funny, and must have told it many times, and must have told it in the hearing of Peter, because a week after September 11, when I’m up to here with fuckwits in the United States who are saying Chomskyian things, what I don’t need, is to get [in] the Spectator my brother recalling, ‘I don’t see why Christopher has become so pro-American; I can remember when he said he wouldn’t be happy until he saw the Red Army watering its horses in the Thames.’ And I thought, well what I thought was ‘Fuck you’. I don’t need this, I don’t need it from [my] brother.

Interviewer: Peter, did you falsely characterise your brother as a Stalinist?

The best part is, in the middle of a conversation about belief in the divine, some idiot in the crowd complains about Christopher’s cigarette:

Female audience member Excuse me. I’m not usually awkward at all but I’m sitting here and we’re asked not to smoke. And I don’t like being in a room where smoking is going on.

CH (smoking heavily): Well you don’t have to stay darling, do you? I’m working here and I’m your guest, OK? And this is what I’m like; nobody has to like it.

Interviewer: Would you just stub that one out?

CH: No. I cleared it with the festival a long time ago. They let me do it.

FAM: We should all be allowed to smoke then.

CH: Fair enough. I wouldn’t object. It might get pretty nasty though. I have a privileged position here, I’m not just one of the audience, so it would be horrible if everyone was like me. This is my last of five gigs, I’ve worked very hard for the festival. I’m going from here to Heathrow airport. If anyone doesn’t like it they can kiss my ass.

Interviewer: Would anyone like to take up that challenge?

(Laughter. Woman walks out)

“I’m not usually awkward at all”? I love the British.

Anyway, read the whole thing.

Throughout my adult life, I’ve been burned by artists. I enjoy a book, movie, or record, and find myself immensely disappointed by the follow-up works by the artist. Sometimes, it’s simply an instance where the first work is so singular, so arresting, that any subsequent work has to pale in comparison.

Other times, it becomes clear that the artist got lucky. He caught lightning in a bottle, and will never be that good again.

Years ago, the first time I phoned the critic and novelist David Gates, I asked him about the novel he was working on. He said, pretty facetiously, “I’m in a sort of bind. If it comes out like Jernigan [his first novel, which I adored], people will say I’m only capable of writing that type of book. If it comes out nothing like Jernigan, people who liked that book will complain that this one is no good.”

A few years later, when I read it, I thought, “This is pretty good, but it’s no Jernigan.” I was a little embarrassed about that reaction, but hey. I read the book again a few months ago, and enjoyed it a lot more than I remembered the first time.

But artists have burned me. I put a lot of stock in a strong artistic vision. After Miller’s Crossing, I was able to forgive the Coen Bros. a lot. Should I have? I kept going to their flicks, despite the recurring disappointments. Eventually, they produced a movie that I enjoyed immensely: The Man Who Wasn’t There. But they also made Intolerable Cruelty.

I haven’t seen a new Woody Allen movie in 7 or 8 years. Too many disappointments, and I was done. Can’t go back to the well too often.

Which gets us to I [Heart] Huckabees. The official VM fiancee and I disagreed about this flick beforehand. We were in agreement that, based on the commercials and trailer, it looked terrible. She dismissed it. I countered, “But it IS directed by the guy who made Three Kings . . .”

I had no intention of seeing Huckabees in the theater, but the DVD release reprised our mini-dispute over the movie. I promised her that, if I did watch it, I’d do so on a weeknight and not when she’s around on the weekends.

Then we found a used DVD sale this weekend, and together spent FAR too much money on movies (a combined $140, but we got 16 titles out of it, including the third season of Family Guy). Because of the “buy 3 get 1 free” part of the sale, I went back to the bins and picked up Huckabees at $12.

After I brought Amy home yesterday, I sat down and watched the movie.

Now, like I said, I was giving it a shot because of Three Kings. I adored that movie when I saw it in the theater with my buddy Jon-Eric. We watched it again the night before the Iraq War began. I watched it a third time during one of last year’s many trips. It should’ve been required viewing before the current war, but it probably would’ve confused both the pro- and anti-war sides.

Anyway, after a five-year gap, the director (David O. Russell) made Huckabees. I’m still trying to figure out why.

It purports to be an existential detective story, but the opposing worldviews it offers are pretty Lowest College Denominator (“Everything’s connected!” “No, everything’s meaningless!”), and the “plot” is centered so deliberately on coincidence that nothing gets around to meaning anything. The lessons we pick up, from what I gather, are that corporations are evil, evangelical Christians are evil, jet-skis are evil, and gasoline is evil. It’s also evil for women to have to look good, for people to buy cheap clothing, and for Lily Tomlin to wear tops with circular cut-outs to accentuate her breasts. I’m not making that up.

So, what I’m getting at is that I was yet again burned by thinking that David O. Russell had more than one good flick in him. It’s possible that his earlier movies were good, and maybe I’ll check them out. But, holy crap, was this one useless movie.

BONUS TIME!

For sticking through to the end of that post, you get the list of all the DVDs the official VM fiancee and I bought this weekend! Joy!

The Family Guy, Vol. 2

I [Heart] Huckabees

A Night at the Opera

The Ladies Man

Moulin Rouge

My Cousin Vinny

Bonnie and Clyde

Army of Darkness

Cannonball Run

The Ref

The Man With Two Brains

Pee-Wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special

Enter the Dragon

Ghost Dog

Brazil

Animal Crackers

P.J. O’Rourke on the need to tax celebrity:

“America’s media and entertainment industry has a gross (as it were) revenue of $316.8 billion a year. If we subtract the income derived from worthy journalism and the publishing of serious books, that leaves $316.8 billion.”